In Shooting Condition

With the airliners flying again, travelers were winging out of Guatemala last week with fresh tales of the two-week revolution. The most surprising report, dutifully passed along from Mexico by the New York Times, was that the celebrated 2,000 tons of Communist arms, shipped in May from Poland to Guatemala, were worthless military junk. The shipment, so the story went, included a vast quantity of useless antitank mines, broken-down Czech machine guns and heavy, worn-out cannon.

If the Kremlin's play for Guatemala had been some inexplicable practical joke, sending useless arms to Arbenz would indeed have been the cream of the jest. But members of the U.S. military mission in Guatemala, who have had a preliminary look at the Red arms, say that they were entirely usable. They included thousands of standard Mauser rifles, machine guns and machine pistols, hand grenades, mortars, 37-mm. antitank guns (deadly against trucks), 75-mm. howitzers suited to the local terrain, plus antitank and anti-personnel mines. All were in shooting condition. Not for lack of weapons, but because it had no heart for defending Communists, did the Guatemala army refuse to fight.

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